With better technology, more police, stiffer minimums, and bigger fails, we now “trail ‘em, nail ‘em, and jail ‘em” faster and harder than ever. Yet as crime is falling, both our prison population and our fear of crime keep rising. So something is terribly wrong. There must be a way to break the cycle of fear — to heal crime. And there is. It’s called restorative justice.

As any detective knows, when something is missing that should be present, a void where there should be a plenum, it is an important clue. Like the archetypal philosophical detective Socrates, I set out to discover what had happened to justice. Had it disappeared from modern minds, hearts, and conversation? Or merely from the consciousness of New Age pilgrims?